On Saturday 9 July 2004,
Militant Esthetix staged a picket of Shadowtime, the opera about Walter
Benjamin by composer Brain Ferneyhough with a libretto by Charles Bernstein.
A one-off concert version without costumes and scenery was performed
at the Colosseum, London WC2. Like our picket of Michael Nyman's The
Commissar Vanishes, this wasn't an expression of indignant identity
politics telling people not to attend ("as a woman/gay/Christian
etc I am offended, so ban this movie!" etc) but an injection of
informed critique designed to widen the miserable parameters of current
cultural debate ("as a woman/gay/Christian etc I am offended, so
ban this movie!" etc).

REPERCUSSIONS

We were later emailed by
members of the orchestra, asking us for the text of our "interesting"
leaflet. This gave us the delightful late-60s image of an orchestra
thinking for itself, organising collectively (and maybe staging an improvised
revolt against score-performance power relations?). The conductor emailed
us accusing us of "cowardice" for being "anonymous"and
saying we were like Ayatollahs issuing Fatwas ignorant of the text of
Satanic Verses.Should we have attended Ferneyhough's talk earlier in
the day? If this was anything like the discussion staged in Munich (desiring
immanent critique of the art object, we flew out there to see the premiere)
then our criticisms could not have been part of a debate. Once the money's
been raised for a project like this, all involved are so defensive there
CAN be no debate. BW wrote to Ferneyhough warning him about Bernstein's
idiocies as soon as he heard a reading of his libretto, and suggesting
he read EL's Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism, but received
no reply. Both BW (The Wire) and EL (Radical Philosophy) have published
critiques of the opera under their own names. Our webite address was
printed on the leaflet. How much more open could we be?